1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle surroundings monitoring apparatus which determines the type of object existing around a vehicle based on an image obtained by a camera mounted on the vehicle.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there has been suggested a vehicle surroundings monitoring apparatus which extracts an image portion likely to be an image of a pedestrian's head from an image of the surroundings of the vehicle captured by an infrared camera mounted on the vehicle and determines whether the type of object in the real space corresponding to the image portion is “pedestrian” according to determination conditions of a luminance of the image portion, a distance between a real space position corresponding to the image portion and the vehicle, and the like (for example, refer to Japanese publication of unexamined patent application No. 2004-303219).
The present inventors, however, found that, if an infrared camera captures a plurality of pedestrians close to each other around the vehicle, an image portion is extracted which is likely to be an image of a pedestrian's head, and whether the type of object in the real space corresponding to the image portion is “pedestrian” is determined according to the determination conditions, then there is a case where the type of object is incorrectly determined to be other than “pedestrian” even though the object is pedestrians actually as a result of the determination.
The present invention has been provided in view of the above background. Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a vehicle surroundings monitoring apparatus, a vehicle surroundings monitoring program, and a vehicle surroundings monitoring method capable of recognizing the type of object existing around the vehicle with accuracy.